Painting Fakes

There is a stunning amount of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship about Jesus in circulation, and the flow doesn't show any sign of letting up.  I guess with 2.4 billion people around the world identifying as Christian in some way, there's no shortage of interest in the subject. Unlike the spate of recent writings on the subject, the sources of evidence are strictly finite.  There are documents - the writings of Jesus' first followers, plus scattered (generally brief) references in non-Christian contemporaries like Tacitus, Josephus or Celsus.  There is a wide range of contextual information from historians and archaeologists which can throw light on the meaning of these documents and against which they can be checked. Yet out of this evidence, or out of the silences between the evidence, authors have produced a huge variety of pictures of Jesus - divine being , freedom fighter , charismatic prophet , cynic philosopher , even (as we shall see) a wholly imaginary pe...

It's strange to admit that I've read my way through a fairly large pile of books of Jesus scholarship and pseudo-scholarship, and yet have only just now read any works by Geza Vermes. Vermes was born in Hungary in 1924, his parents non-practicing Jews who converted to Catholicism during Geza's childhood but were still swept up in the Holocaust.  Geza himself was ordained as a Catholic priest despite being rejected by both the Jesuits and the Dominicans because of his Jewish ancestry.  In the late 1950s, however, he left the Catholic church and reasserted his Jewish identity.  Most of his later life was spent in England, where he served as Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford University until his death in 2013.  His book covers quote both the Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph describing him as "the greatest Jesus scholar of his generation". He has two main claims to fame.  One is as a translator and interpreter of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which he first examine...

As I've been reading Reza Aslan over the last couple of weeks, Larry Norman's 'The Outlaw' has been going round and round in my head.  Larry Norman is definitely not a Jesus scholar, nor a scholar of any kind.  He is a singer and songwriter, a pioneer of gospel rock and one of the more interesting characters to grace the Christian music scene.  'The Outlaw' is one of the pithiest summaries of the debate about Jesus I've ever heard, five short stanzas which say more, and are much easier to understand, than many of the thousand learned tomes written on the subject.  The song first appeared on Norman's 1972 album Only Visiting this Planet .  Here's a suitably antique recording. Some say he was an outlaw, that he roamed across the land, With a band of unschooled ruffians and few young fishermen, No one knew just where he came from, or exactly what he'd done, But they said it must be something bad that kept him on the run. ...

It's been a while since I reviewed a Life of Jesus, but I did promise to review more recent samples of the genre so here, hot off the press, is Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  I first heard of Aslan's book via a scathing review by John Dickson .  A couple of weeks later, the book itself was staring at me from the new acquisitions display in my local library, so here is my own (rather less scathing) review. Aslan was born in Iran in 1972 and fled to the US with his family in 1979 following the Iranian revolution.  After a period as an evangelical Christian in his teens he shifted back to Islam as a young adult.  He has a doctorate in religious studies and teaches creative writing and religion at various universities.  Apparently Zealot has caused quite a stir in the US and he has not just been criticised for the content of his book, but had his credentials and his character impugned on national television in a way that make...

John Shelby Spong retired as Episcopalian (Anglican, for us Aussies) Bishop of Newark in 2001 after 24 years in the role, and has since worked as a freelance author and speaker.  Over the past three decades he has become the most outspoken and controversial advocate for progressive Christianity, reviled by conservative Christians and admired by fellow progressives.  He has taken unorthodox stands on a range of issues, including human sexuality, the status of the Bible and the role of women.  His stance is summed up in the title of another of his books - Why Christianity Must Change or Die. He has written a lot about Jesus over the years but Jesus for the Non-Religious: Recovering the Divine at the Heart of the Human, published in 2007, is his most comprehensive treatment of the historical person at the heart of the Christian faith.  After leading off with his devotion to Jesus, he follows with this. The other (motivation) driving me into this study is ...

I know I promised to review some more recent Lives of Jesus and I've been doing that, but late last year I picked up a copy of Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus and the Word in a second hand shop.  Since Bultmann has made a couple of cameos in these reviews, I thought I'd tell you a little more about what he says. Jesus and the Word was first published in German in 1926, and translated into English in 1934.  Bultmann had yet to embark on the project of "demythologising" Christianity which was to make him famous or notorious throughout the Christian world, depending on your viewpoint.  Here in this book we can see the beginnings of that theology and understand both its strength and its weakness. One thing this book shows is how little the study of the Gospels has changed over the past century.  Bultmann has a lot in common with the present day fellows of the Jesus Seminar .  Like them, he sees the Gospels as layered texts, some parts recording the actual wo...

When I reviewed Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ earlier this year, I made the mistake of assuming he had invented the idea of Jesus' twin brother.  I was wrong.  The idea has ancient roots, and as well as featuring in Pullman's book is the central feature of an exceedingly odd book, The Twin Deception, by Tony Bushby, published by the small independent Queensland publisher Joshua Books in 2006. Bushby is a prolific writer of Christian pseudo-history with at least six similar volumes to his name.  There is a lot of familiar stuff here, including hidden messages, concealed identities and Catholic cover-ups, but Bushby takes the art-form to a whole new level. I don't mean his writing.  His grammar is questionable, his prose convoluted and his telling of his story is so incoherent as to be almost incomprehensible.  Nonetheless, the extent of his reworking of the tale is beyond anything attempted by the likes of Barbara Th...

So, after John Carroll's existential midrash on the life of Jesus, we return to a more typical type of contemporary midrash , the historical reconstruction.  Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L Reed represents a detailed forensic examination of historical evidence in the tradition of the Jesus Seminar , of which Crossan was co-chair for a decade.  Crossan is perhaps the more famous of this pair of authors, known for his New Testament scholarship and his reconstructions of Jesus' life and the first century church.  Reed, while lower profile, appears to be just as distinguished in academic terms and specialises in Palestinian archaeology. Within the dual focus of their sub-title, the division of labour seems clear - Reed deals with stones, Crossan with texts. It is the combination of the two which provides the power and fascination of this book.  The archaeology of first century Palestine can't tell us...

To keep the Australian theme going here is another Australian Life of Jesus , The Existential Jesus by John Carroll.  However, this is where the resemblance to  John Dickson ends .   Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is not an active church member or a biblical scholar.  Instead, he approaches the story of Jesus through a secular reading group he convenes at the University, which has twice read the Gospel of Mark in its entirety.  He has found the story profoundly affecting and life changing, and this book is the result. Nor is Carroll greatly interested in the Quest for the Historical Jesus, and is scornful of both the idea of Jesus as eschatologocal prophet , and of the Jesus Seminar with their colour-coded sayings.  Not that he doesn't make use of historical research - he leans particularly heavily on Catholic scholar Raymond E Brown - but his intention is quite different from theirs.  This is ...

After the hilarious foolishness of Stephan Huller  it's kind of calming to read a book about Jesus as sensible as John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus: and introduction to the man from Nazareth. John Dickson  is a theologian and ancient historian, co-director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, and has a shadow life as a gospel singer.  He is representative of the sort of moderate evangelicalism that permeates the Anglican church and many other mainstream protestant denominations here in Australia.  It would be hard to imagine a more orthodox commentator on the life of Jesus. The first thing that stands out about Dickson, more than any other writer I have read on the Life of Jesus , is his transparency about his sources.  Indeed there is a 100-page companion volume to A Spectator's Guide entitled The Christ Files which provides a handy summary of the various ancient sources - both Christian and non-Christian - for the life of ...